Current time in Tokyo: Aug. 7, 6:08 p.m.
TOKYO — The U.S. women’s water polo team won its third consecutive Olympic gold medal on Saturday, routing Spain, 14-5.
The United States took a 6-1 lead, and after a brief Spain flurry, led by 7-4 at the half. But Spain failed to score at all in the third quarter, and the game was essentially over.
Maddie Musselman led the balanced scoring attack with three goals. There was also a goal for Maggie Steffens, the captain and for years the best player in the women’s game, who along with Melissa Seidemann captured her third gold.
Spain
United States
The United States played lockdown defense, getting bodies in front of many of Spain’s shots before they even reached the goal. Ashleigh Johnson, widely considered the world’s best goalkeeper, played nearly all of the game and saved 11 of the 15 shots that reached her.
“It wasn’t just one player,” Steffens said. “It wasn’t two players. You look up on there and we had different people getting blocks, different people getting huge goals here, different people guarding.”
Still, the path to the title was not as easy as expected.
Coming into the Tokyo Olympics, the U.S. team looked close to unstoppable: Between the 2016 and 2020 Games, it amassed a record of 128-3. Spain was also the Americans’ opponent in the last two world championship finals. The United States won those games, 11-6 and 13-6.
But the Americans suffered an unexpected group play loss to the eventual bronze medalists, Hungary, 10-9. The team shot just 29 percent that day; in the final, that figure was a more characteristic 54 percent.
The team had expressed concern going into the Olympics, since the pandemic had limited its games against top opposition.
Coach Adam Krikorian said before the Games that it was “tough when you’re just competing against each other,” and that he sometimes had trouble motivating the players: “We’ve had so much success, and it’s natural for us to relax a little bit.”
If the players relaxed a bit against Hungary, it was out of their systems for the final, which looked like the kind of romps followers of the team have been seeing for years.
Nelly Korda of the United States held off a final-round challenge from Japan’s Mone Inami and New Zealand’s Lydia Ko to claim the gold medal in women’s golf at Kasumigaseki Country Club.
Her victory, six days after Xander Schauffele won the gold in men’s golf, gave the United States a sweep of the tournaments at the Tokyo Olympics.
Korda, the world’s top-ranked women’s golfer, had led after the second and third rounds, and closed with a two-under-par 69.
But Inami and Ko both shot six-under 65s on Saturday, methodically slicing into the 23-year-old Korda’s advantage and taking the race for the gold to the day’s final holes.
Inami, 22, birdied the 17th hole to pull even with Korda with a hole to play, but she then bogeyed the final hole, dropping her one shot off the lead. That left Ko, 24, who was also a shot behind, as the only challenger for the gold medal, but she finished with a par that was promptly matched by Korda.
Korda, who won her first professional major at the Women’s P.G.A. Championship in June, left the 18th green with a broad smile, but for Inami and Ko, the day was not over: They immediately headed for a playoff to determine who would claim the silver medal, and who would get the bronze. That second competition lasted a single hole: Inami made par and finished second when Ko recorded a bogey.
Korda’s older sister, Jessica, also played for the United States at the Tokyo Games. Jessica Korda finished in a tie for 15th, then returned to the 18th hole to embrace Nelly after her victory.
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Nelly Korda United States |
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Mone Inami  Japan |
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 New Zealand |
SAITAMA, Japan — It was not always pretty, but in the end, the United States men’s basketball team ascended to the heights they were always expected to reach. Overcoming a slow start to the Olympic tournament, the Americans dispatched France, 87-82, with relative comfort in the final game on Saturday morning at Saitama Super Arena to win their 16th gold medal in the event.
In front of a sizable crowd — not of fans, but of national team staff, Olympic volunteers and journalists — the United States looked far more cohesive and confident than when they lost to France in the opening game of competition.
Basketball: Men’s Gold Medal GameFinal |
T | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
United States |
22 | 22 | 27 | 16 | 87 | |
 France |
18 | 21 | 24 | 19 | 82 | |
That contest had exposed some of their early issues as a team — namely, a lack of familiarity as a group. But they had none of those problems on Saturday morning.
Kevin Durant, once again, was the focal point and main driving force of the team, scoring 29 points to go with six rebounds. Jayson Tatum contributed a strong performance of his own, finishing with 19 points.
The Americans built an 8-point lead heading into the final quarter and withstood a number of runs from the French to close the game. France cut the lead to 85-82 with 10.2 seconds remaining, giving them a glimmer of hope. But Kevin Durant sank two free throws to effectively seal the result.
Rudy Gobert finished with 16 points and eight rebounds for France before fouling out in the finals seconds of the game.
Peres Jepchirchir of Kenya broke away late in the race to sprint to the gold medal in the women’s marathon.
Jepchirchir was among a large pack of runners that held together on Saturday morning until the late going. She went on to defeat another Kenyan runner, Brigid Kosgei, the world-record holder, who earned the silver medal, and Molly Seidel of the United States, who claimed the bronze.
Jepchirchir won by 16 seconds, in 2 hours 27 minutes 20 seconds.
Officials moved the race in 2019 to Sapporo, 500 miles north of Tokyo, in a futile attempt to escape the sapping heat and humidity that have smothered the Summer Games.
Seidel, running only her third marathon, won a surprise bronze in 2:27:36. She became the third American woman to win a medal in the Olympic marathon. Joan Benoit Samuelson won the inaugural race at the 1984 Los Angeles Games and Deena Kastor took bronze at the 2004 Athens Games.
Hours before the start, the marathon was moved up an hour to 6 a.m. to slightly moderate the effects of a record heat wave on Hokkaido, the northern Japanese island where Sapporo is. But it was swampy at 78 degrees Fahrenheit, with 82 percent humidity.
The race began with many of the runners wearing hats and sunglasses and trying to find narrow areas of shade at a cautious pace. Fifteen of the 88 entrants dropped out.
Time |
||
|---|---|---|
|
Peres Jepchirchir  Kenya |
2:27:20 | |
|
Brigid Kosgei Kenya |
2:27:36
+0:16 |
|
|
Molly Seidel United States |
2:27:46
+0:26 |
|
| 4 |
Roza Dereje  Ethiopia |
2:28:38
+1:18 |
| 5 |
Volha Mazuronak  Belarus |
2:29:06
+1:46 |
| 6 |
Melat Yisak Kejeta  Germany |
2:29:16
+1:56 |
| 7 |
Eunice Chebichii Chumba  Bahrain |
2:29:36
+2:16 |
| 8 |
Mao Ichiyama Japan |
2:30:13
+2:53 |
| 9 |
Malindi Elmore  Canada |
2:30:59
+3:39 |
| 10 |
Sinead Diver  Australia |
2:31:14
+3:54 |
The winning time was the second slowest of the 10 women’s Olympic marathons, but time did not matter on Saturday. Survival mattered. Winning mattered.
Ice baths for the Olympic runners were set up in first aid and recovery areas inside Odori Park in Sapporo, where the marathon began and ended, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Fourteen water supply tables were set up along the course, nine of them supplied with bags of crushed ice. Ambulances were to follow the runners during the race, the newspaper reported.
The next-to-last day of the Tokyo Olympics wraps up on Saturday with the gold medal contest in men’s soccer and additional gold to be awarded in women’s golf, men’s volleyball and beach volleyball, men’s platform diving, women’s water polo and much more. All times are Eastern and are subject to network changes.
GOLF Coverage of the final round of women’s stroke play continues through 3 a.m. on the Golf Channel. A replay starts at 6:30 a.m., also on the Golf Channel.
VOLLEYBALL Argentina and Brazil vie for the men’s bronze medal at 12:30 a.m. on USA. The men’s gold medal match between France and the Russian Olympic Committee begins at 8:15 a.m. on NBC, with a replay at 1:40 p.m. on USA.
KARATE Coverage on NBCOlympics.com will include the women’s 61-kilogram kumite (elimination rounds at 1 a.m., semifinals at 6:20 a.m., gold medal bout at 6:55 a.m.) and the men’s 75-kilogram kumite (elimination rounds at 3:50 a.m., semifinals at 6:37 a.m., gold medal bout at 7:05 a.m.).
BEACH VOLLEYBALL Delayed coverage of the men’s gold medal match between Anders Mol and Christian Sorum of Norway and Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy of the Russian Olympic Committee will start at 1:05 a.m. on NBC.
HANDBALL A replay of a women’s semifinal game airs at 1:30 a.m. on NBCSN. At 5 a.m. on NBCSN, Egypt and Spain meet in a delayed broadcast of the men’s bronze medal game. The men’s gold medal game, between France and Denmark, starts at 8 a.m. on NBC, with a replay at 12:30 p.m. on USA.
DIVING The final round in the men’s 10-meter platform competition begins at 2:30 a.m. on USA.
WATER POLO The bronze medal match between Hungary and the Russian Olympic Committee starts at 2:45 a.m. on CNBC, and then the U.S. women take on Spain for the gold medal at 3:30 a.m. on USA.
BASKETBALL Serbia and France meet in the women’s bronze medal game at 3 a.m. on CNBC. At 7 a.m. on USA, the men’s bronze medal game matches Slovenia against Australia.
CYCLING The men’s Madison final starts at 3:55 a.m. on NBCOlympics.com
RHYTHMIC GYMNASTICS The individual all-around final airs at 5 a.m. on USA.
WRESTLING At 5:45 a.m., the Olympic Channel has coverage of repechage and medal matches in the 65- and 97-kilogram divisions of the men’s freestyle and the 50-kilogram division of the women’s freestyle. A replay will air at 9 a.m., also on the Olympic Channel.
BASEBALL The United States, playing its national game, will seek the gold medal against the host country, Japan, at 6 a.m. on NBCSN.
EQUESTRIAN The team jumping final starts at 6 a.m. on NBCOlympics.com; NBC will include some coverage in its multisport broadcast starting at 8 a.m., and NBCSN will have a replay at 10:30 a.m.
SOCCER Coverage of the men’s gold medal game between Brazil and Spain starts at 6:30 a.m. on Telemundo. USA will carry the game on a delay starting at 10 a.m.
ARTISTIC SWIMMING The team free routine final starts at 6:30 a.m. on NBCOlympics.com; NBC will include some coverage in its multisport broadcast starting at 8 a.m., and NBCSN will carry a replay at 9:30 a.m.
TRACK AND FIELD Coverage on NBCOlympics.com will include finals in the women’s high jump (6:35 a.m.), the women’s 10,000 meters (6:45 a.m.), the men’s javelin throw (7 a.m.), the men’s 1,500 meters (7:40 a.m.), the women’s 4x400-meter relay (8:30 a.m.) and the men’s 4x400-meter relay (8:50 a.m.). NBC will include some coverage in its multisport broadcast beginning at 8 a.m.
CANOE/KAYAK A replay of the finals in the men’s and women’s 500-meter kayak fours, the men’s 1,000-meter single canoe and the women’s 500-meter double canoe starts at 9 a.m. on NBCSN.
MODERN PENTATHLON The laser run, the final event in the men’s competition, will air on a delay at 12:30 p.m. on NBCSN.
TOKYO — During the baseball season, Tyler Austin plays his home games at Yokohama Baseball Stadium as part of the Yokohama DeNA Baystars, a team in Japan’s top professional league.
And now, on the U.S. baseball team at the Olympics, that very stadium is also home for Austin.
That familiarity — with not only his surroundings but the opposing pitchers as well — has helped Austin, 29, a former Yankees prospect, power the United States to the gold medal game on Saturday night. The opponent: Japan, a team made up of the very same players Austin faces in the professional league the rest of the year.
The experience has served him well. Through five games in the tournament, Austin, a designated hitter, is batting a team best .429 (9 for 21) with two home runs and seven runs batted in.
With the Baystars this year, Austin’s second with the team, he is enjoying an even better season than last. He is hitting .314 with 19 home runs and 49 R.B.I. through 68 games. He credited his wife with crafting an off-season workout and nutrition plan that he said had helped him gain strength after he lost too much weight last year.
Because the Nippon Professional Baseball league, unlike Major League Baseball, takes an Olympic break, Austin was able to play for the United States. But it’s also why Japan is the favorite to claim its first Olympic gold medal in baseball and is the only undefeated team in the tournament.
“These are definitely the best arms they’ve got over here,” Austin said of Japan’s pitching staff.
Given that most of his teammates had never faced most of Japan’s arms entering the Olympics, Austin has tried to serve as a resource to them beyond simply video. “Any little information that I can give — I try to do my best to give the best scouting report that I can,” he said.
He might be helping: As a whole, the United States is hitting .247 — trailing South Korea (.294) and Japan (.288) — but leads in slugging percentage (.434) entering Saturday. (The United States’ strength has been its pitching: Its collective 2.18 earned run average is more than a whole run better than the next best team.)
Austin will have to serve as an advance scout for his teammates again heading into the gold medal game: Japan will start Masato Morishita, the 23-year-old right-hander who is one of the best talents in N.P.B. on the Hiroshima Toyo Carp. In a 7-4 win over Mexico earlier in the tournament, Morishita allowed two runs over five innings and struck out three batters.
“I’ve faced Morishita a few times,” Austin said. “Hopefully I can give a pretty good scouting report on Saturday.”
On the eve of the Olympic closing ceremony, Tokyo 2020 organizers claimed victory against a virus that delayed and almost derailed the Games, calling their measures a model for other major international events.
Brian McCloskey, a leading health adviser to the Games, said that Tokyo’s expansive testing regimen for athletes and others, combined with mask wearing and social distancing, kept the Games “safe and secure” and prevented transmission of the coronavirus between international arrivals and the Japanese public.
“By following basic public health measures and by layering on top of that the testing program, we have shown that it is possible to keep the pandemic at bay,” McCloskey, the chairman of the Tokyo 2020 Independent Expert Panel, said at a news conference on Saturday. “And that is a very important lesson from Tokyo to the rest of the world.”
Olympic organizers on Saturday reported 22 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total number of infections in the Olympic bubble to slightly more than 400. McCloskey said that organizers had tested more than 600,000 people.
No athletes were among the new cases, reflecting organizers’ relative success in walling off competitors from the outbreak raging in the rest of Japan, which on Friday reached a milestone of one million coronavirus cases.
At least 409 people connected to the Games have tested positive since July 1, including 32 athletes, according to organizers. Most of the infections have occurred among Japanese nationals, including contractors and others working at Olympic venues.
McCloskey said that organizers were in talks with national teams and Japanese officials to develop a system for testing athletes and personnel after the Games concluded to monitor potential infections in the coming weeks.
The pandemic caused the Games to be postponed from last year. Weeks before the opening ceremony, an outbreak fueled by the highly infectious Delta variant prompted emergency restrictions in Tokyo and other parts of Japan. The measures have done little to slow the spread of the virus, as Tokyo and Japan both had record numbers of daily cases in recent days and officials warned that the outbreak was severely straining the health system.
Some experts say that the Games, despite their near-total lack of spectators, have contributed to a feeling of pandemic fatigue in Japan and encouraged people to let down their guard, allowing the virus to spread. McCloskey disputed that idea, saying there was no evidence of a link “between the Games and the way in which the Japanese people are or are not behaving.”
TOKYO — The Americans’ efforts at the Tokyo Games have produced results that might be the envy of the world but have fallen short of their recent lofty standards. The U.S. Olympic team is in danger of losing the gold medal race in a Summer Olympics for the first time since 2008.
Poised to win about 106 medals based on the final rounds of competition through Sunday, it will slip back to roughly on par with the London Games in 2012, when it won 104 medals. The team won a record 121 medals in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, and 46 of them were gold, two fewer than the mark the Chinese set for gold medals in 2008 in Beijing.
The blame for the shortfall can be spread around. The track team won 32 medals in Rio but had just 22 heading into the final night. American men have not won a gold medal in the speed events that have long been their bread and butter.
The U.S. women’s soccer team, the two-time defending World Cup champion, settled for a bronze medal. Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast ever, missed the bulk of the meet as she battled mental stress. American rowers failed to make the Olympic podium for the first time since 2008.
With the slip in American dominance, several other countries, notably Japan and China, have surged.
Japan, with 51 medals through Friday night, surged past its tally of 41 medals, including 12 gold, won in Rio. In these Games, it has 24 gold. After eight years of backtracking, China’s Olympic sports machine has returned: With 36 golds compared with 31 for the United States, the Chinese have a shot at winning the gold medal race for the first time since 2008.
When Bethany Shriever secured the gold medal in the women’s BMX racing final, it was in an event in which she was not even projected to be a finalist. The win last week was Britain’s first Olympic gold in the event.
But it wasn’t just that Shriever, who was racing against the two-time defending Olympic champion Mariana Pajon of Colombia, was an unlikely contender to make the final, let alone claim gold. It’s that without some help from a GoFundMe page she set up in 2017, Shriever might not have even made it to Tokyo.
“The chances would be very, very, slim,” she said.
Shriever, 22, grew up participating in the British Cycling program, honing her skills in a sport where she was often the only girl at the track — something she took note of almost instantly, she said.
“I would just be training with boys pretty much,” she said. The number of competitors participating in boys’ races, particularly as she joined bigger events, always greatly outnumbered those in the girls’ races.
Shriever’s breakout moment came when she captured the junior world title at the 2017 UCI BMX World Championships in Rock Hill, S. C. But within months, Shriever was questioning her future in BMX. In a budget review after the 2016 Rio Games, UK Sport, the government body that invests in Olympic and Paralympic sports in Britain, cut funding to the women’s BMX program and announced it would finance only the men’s program in its journey to Tokyo.
“It was questioning things like, ‘Why haven’t we got the same chances as the men?’” Shriever recalled feeling at the time. “I wanted to get to the top and be able to earn a living from doing this.”
So Shriever decided to stay home in Essex with her family and take a second job as a teaching assistant helping children. She worked three days a week, and headed straight to the track or the gym afterward. “There were nights when I couldn’t put everything into training because I was just so knackered from work,” she said, adding that her employer was flexible with her schedule, giving her half days or allowing her time off for competitions. Her parents ferried her to races.
As the Olympic cycle began in 2019, Shriever knew that to earn enough points to get to Tokyo, she needed a better solution. She calculated what it might cost to hire a coach and to compete in various races before setting up a GoFundMe page for 50,000 pounds, or just about $70,000. She managed to raise nearly 20,000 pounds, which she said was used up almost immediately because of two events in Australia.
“That decision opened a lot of eyes that I did need help and I did have the potential to compete in the Games,” she said about launching a GoFundMe.
By midsummer 2019, Shriever had rejoined the British Cycling program. She did so with the help of a coach from British Cycling and a push by the program to get UK Sport to reinvest in disciplines whose budgets had been cut.
Shriever won all three of her heats in Tokyo and then the final, screaming on her bike as she crossed the finish line. In two weeks, Shriever will be competing for another first-place finish at the 2021 UCI BMX World Championships in Papendal, Holland.
Shriever is still the only woman on her six-member racing team, which includes Kye Whyte, who won the silver medal in the men’s event and was cheering from the sidelines as she made history. In addition to Shriever’s and Whyte’s medals, Charlotte Worthington won gold in the BMX women’s freestyle, an event that made its debut in Tokyo.
Women have come a long way in BMX, Shriever said, with more getting involved despite the obstacles they have to overcome to get the same opportunities as men. There is still work to do, she said, but she feels hopeful about the future.
“We are going in the right direction, for sure,” Shriever said.
Karate made its debut as an official Olympic sport at the Tokyo Games this week as 120 men and women from around the world vied for medals.
The Japanese organizers successfully lobbied for karate to be included as a medal sport, an upgrade from the cameo it made as a demonstration sport at the 1964 Tokyo Games.
Two-thirds of the athletes are competing in the kumite portion of the program, where two fighters face off and try to hit and kick their opponents to score points.
The other third will compete in kata, which includes the building blocks of karate performed against an imaginary opponent, traditional aspects of the martial art that purists relish.
Unfortunately for karate fans, karate will not be included in the Paris Games in 2024. But at least for a few days, it will share the biggest stage in global sports.
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The U.S. Olympic team is in danger of losing the gold medal race. - The New York Times
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